When it comes to different types of content that you can publish on your business website or blog, there is always a world of possibilities. However, among all those variations of blog content, there is a very important one which often gets overlooked: evergreen content. Evergreen content is very important for the success of any blog.

Just like the name specifies, evergreen content simply means a well-written piece of content – on any topic – that doesn’t get outdated. The evergreen blog content stays useful year to year, season to season with little or no need for any upkeep. It always remains valuable to the reader. Evergreen content typically encompasses the following 3 characteristics:

1. Timeless: As mentioned earlier, content that’s evergreen stands the test of time. With exceptions of sometimes requiring few tweaks here and there, this content won’t change a lot and it is practically everlasting.

2. Valuable and High Quality: In order to reap true benefits of being evergreen, blog content must be of high quality and valuable enough so as to get noticed. In case a piece of the blog content which you intended to become evergreen is not valuable to most of your readers and it does not attract substantial views when it is first published, then it won’t ever become evergreen.

3. Canonical: evergreen content is normally the definitive or canonical piece of content that your business has on a given topic. It is detailed, in-depth and it most likely took you much longer time to create as compared to the other, content pieces.

Common Evergreen Formats

Below are some of the common evergreen formats that you might consider while generating lasting content.

· Encyclopedia-esque entries
· Instructional “how to” tutorials
· Lists
· Top tips
· Product reviews
· Videos

Writing in the above formats doesn’t automatically make your piece evergreen but these structures usually tend to work quite well. Videos are particularly effective whenever you have to illustrate something like how to grout a tub or how to frost cupcakes. In case videos aren’t possible, just consider using a series of images or illustrations to your advantage.

Examples of Evergreen Sites

There are several evergreen sites that you can find on the internet today. The major producers of the evergreen content are:

· answers.com
· about.com
· wikipedia.com
· imdb.com
· ehow.com

These sites usually publish huge quantities of the evergreen articles on a wide range of topics. For instance, Wikipedia ranks almost half of all the Google searches on the first page. However, in an attempt to churn out the pieces, some of the evergreen sites usually end up producing very low-quality articles. It is good to visit the sites not only to see great examples of evergreens articles but also investigate how some of the sites are lacking and the articles that you could write so as to improve them.

Advantages of Writing Evergreen Content

Posting evergreen content on your website has several benefits:

It Gives You Authority

Knowing the steps on how to do some things and sharing them online increases your chances of becoming a go-to person in your niche despite of how basic your information is. However, the idea here is providing information that the people in your industry want. However, being an authority within the niche doesn’t happen overnight. As a result, you’ll have to be very consistent in producing high quality content.

It Sustains Your Website

The idea of such kind of content is to always remain useful regardless of the time. For example, “How To…” articles usually stand the test of time since someone somewhere will certainly need the guide at some point in the foreseeable future. In addition, evergreen content doesn’t need much updating (except when there’s new information), unlike seasonal and news articles.

It Helps Increase Traffic on Your Website

Articles of the evergreen quality hardly expire. This enables these article to generate traffic even if you aren’t selling them. When your site generates more and more organic traffic, this equates to higher ranking on SERPs which establishes your reputation as a site that provides trusted contents.

Continues to Generate Leads

Due to the continuous traffic that it generates, evergreen content which is optimized for lead generation also has a very powerful capacity to constantly generate leads over a given time. For instance, The HubSpot Inbound Marketing blog which has published around 3,000 articles up to now, can credit lots of the day-to-day leads that it generates to the articles which were published several months or even years ago.

High Search Engine Rankings

Due to timelessness and quality of evergreen blog contents, it will normally rank quite well in search engines with time. This makes it very critical for the bloggers to make sure that evergreen content has been well-optimized with keywords for which they are trying to rank in the search engines.

With new emphases on in-depth articles and longform writing (with boosts from Google), evergreen content has become more valuable than ever before. The future of a website relies a lot on content. As a result, writing quality evergreen articles ought to be among the topmost items on your priority list.